Languages of the year: 1972

July 21, 2022 — 1995 was an exceptional year for programming languages: Java, Javascript, PHP and Ruby were all created in 1995. I was curious what the top language was for each of the past 50 years.

Data used in this post:

id	title	appeared	rank	also
c	C⁺²	1972	3	Prolog Smalltalk
ml	ML	1973	156
sql	SQL	1974	8
yacc	Yacc	1975	137
sas	SAS	1976	31
awk	awk	1977	72
tex	Tex	1978	88
rexx	Rexx	1979	101
ada	Ada	1980	44
nial	Nial	1981	389
postscript	PostScript	1982	75
vhdl	VHDL	1983	96
matlab	MATLAB⁺¹	1984	15	Objective-C
cpp	C++⁺¹	1985	7	ARM
postgresql	PostgreSQL⁺¹	1986	33	Erlang
perl	Perl	1987	13
mathematica	Mathematica⁺¹	1988	39	Tcl
bash	Bash	1989	56
haskell	Haskell	1990	23
python	Python⁺²	1991	5	HTML Visual Basic
dylan	Dylan	1992	104
r	R⁺¹	1993	12	Lua
racket	Racket	1994	60
java	Java⁺⁴	1995	1	JavaScript PHP Ruby MySQL
xml	XML⁺²	1996	10	CSS OCaml
rebol	REBOL	1997	106
actionscript	ActionScript	1998	151
tls	TLS	1999	112
csharp	C#	2000	16
json	JSON	2001	22
scratch	Scratch	2002	141
groovy	Groovy	2003	51
scala	Scala	2004	18
f-sharp	F#	2005	55
powershell	PowerShell	2006	41
clojure	Clojure	2007	32
nim	Nim	2008	70
go	Go	2009	14
rust	Rust	2010	27
kotlin	Kotlin⁺¹	2011	43	Elixir
typescript	TypeScript⁺¹	2012	34	Julia
purescript	PureScript	2013	132
swift	Swift	2014	19
zig	Zig	2015	138
reason	Reason	2016	103
mdx	MDX	2017	360
deno	Deno	2018	272
v	V	2019	165
bicep	Bicep	2020	616
nimskull	Nimskull	2021	2034

Languages of the year: 1972 - 2022

Data used in this post: